October 27, 2009

Brains Falling Out

How To Succeed In Social MediaThe smartest thing I've read about social media in a long time, from Monday Morning Memo:

"Focus your attention on your customers. Social media will take care of itself."

Thanks to Mike Huntfor this(c'mon, is that really your name?)

Oh, It's All About Me!Has there ever been a bigger, stupider, more cliche-ridden campaign than Yahoo's new global "branding" campaign? That's a rhetorical question.

It would be hard to find a campaign that more thoroughly runs counter to my brilliant principles of advertising. What? You haven't read my brilliant principles? Here you go.

Nerd's Eye ViewI admit it. I'm a geek. Just about the only things I watch on TV (when baseball season is over) are Nova and Nature and shows about black holes and sea otters.

I love nature and trees and seahorses and cuddly koalas and all of God's and Disney's creatures just as much as the next guy. But I've about had it with every wildlife program ending with the solemn pronouncement that man is the problem. Aren't there any other problems besides us? Aren't tornadoes a problem? And drought? And disease? And asteroids? And earthquakes? And Twitter? Can't we at least share some of the blame?And Speaking Of TwitterOn March 3, 2009 TAC predicted we would soon have "Twitter: The Musical."

Well, we were close. According to Ad Broad, there was some kind of Broadway/Twitter thing that happened earlier this year. I'm not sure what it was because when I try to read this Twitter crap my brains start falling out.

I predicted that it would mark the beginning of the end of the Great Twitter Scare of '09. Let's hope I was right.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."